The present audio recording finally gets underway a project that I announced some time ago and that looks likely to be as interminable in its length as the simultaneously-running ‘Western canon’ project which is still at the stage of commentary on the first books of the first of the epics of Homer: namely, a chronological, line-by-line commentary on all the published works of Nietzsche from 1872 to 1888.
This project, though - vast and lengthy as it is - may possibly attract a larger audience than the ‘Western Canon’ project, since I am surely better qualified as a ‘Nietzsche exegete’ than I am as a scholar of Homer.
That said, it must be admitted that the present two-and-a-quarter-hour talk proved - contrary to my intentions for it - to be no more than a ‘prelude’ to the study of Nietzsche’s first published book. The talk recorded here, since it skips the longer preface (added only fourteen years later by a very different Nietzsche), ends up penetrating only a dozen lines or so into the 1872 text and indeed takes even these only as a pretext for a long historical digression.
As I state at the end of the recording, however, I intend to plunge, in the next session, directly into the letter of the opening lines of “The Birth of Tragedy” proper and to pursue a line-by-line reading up until the end of the book, and eventually up until the very end of Nietzsche’s authorial career.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.